C-GROWL: The Daring Little Airplane

Lorraine Douglas is the youth services co-ordinator at the Winnipeg
Public Library.

C-GROWL is the biography of the de Havilland Chipmunk plane first built
in Canada in 1946. The plane is depicted in paintings at various places
in the world and on different missions through the years.

The attractively rendered color paintings are accompanied by sidebars
containing interesting information. For example, one page records the
Prince’s flight over London in 1949, while the facing page shows a
painting of the instrument panel of the plane above Tower Bridge; the
sidebar offers a good explanation of all of the instruments in the
panel.

Some readers in the target age group may be put off by the preschool
storybook nature of the text (“It’s been a busy two years for
C-GROWL teaching people to fly”), and the paintings are the only
admirable feature of the book’s design. Recommended with reservations.